Namespaces, revisited.

I conservatively extended namespaces, but that took an internal overhaul of how scopes are treated. Shorthands are syntactic sugar for full-blown expressions.

using System

The above is sugar for:

using System (c0, c1, c2, ...)

Where c0, c1, c2, ... are all combinators in the System workspace. And that is sugar for:

using ε = System (c0, c1, c2, ...)

Which is again sugar for a number of renames.

using ε = System (c0 = c0, c1 = c1, c2 = c2, ...)

The renames all introduce bound names into the current scope. E.g.,

using Sys = System (p = print)

This will bind 'Sys::p' to 'System::print'.

Docstrings

I added docstrings to the Egel language some time ago. You can add documentation to either a file or a combinator.

@"""A multiline docstring for a file"""

def f =
    @"this is the fabulous 'f' combinator"
    [X -> 42]

Given docstrings, you can now ask for that interactively in the REPL.

>> help 'f'
{"this is the fabulous 'f' combinator"}

'Help' will do a best-match against all combinator definitions.